Veteran Hong Kong filmmaker Tsui Hark (徿克) will make a rare foray into the horror genre and direct the third installment of the The Eye series, his wife said yesterday.
The Eye 3 will be about a woman haunted by visions after her husband is killed in a diving accident, Tsui's wife Shi Nansun (施南生) said.
Fellow Hong Kong director Peter Chan's (陳可辛) Applause Pictures, which produced the first two installments, will work on the latest Chinese-language film as well, said Shi, who is also the executive director of Tsui's production company.
PHOTO: AP
Shi did not reveal the cast of the movie.
The series began with The Eye, (見鬼) directed by twin brothers Oxide and Danny Pang. The film was about a young woman who sees the visions of a dead woman whose corneas she inherited in a transplant.
The remake rights to The Eye have been sold to Paramount Pictures, with Renee Zellweger reportedly cast in a starring role.
Tsui's repertoire is broad, encompassing animation, comedy and action. But he isn't known as a horror specialist.
Organizers of an evangelical summer camp for children featured in the documentary Jesus Camp are discontinuing the camp because of negative reaction sparked by the film and recent vandalism at the campsite in Devils Lake, North Dakota.
"We have decided to hold different activities in future," Pentecostal pastor and camp organizer Becky Fischer said.
Fischer was the central figure in Jesus Camp, a documentary about Pentecostal evangelical Christians, some of whom send their children to summer camp where they pray, "speak in tongues" and are urged to campaign against abortion.
In the months since the film was released the campground was vandalized and Fischer was inundated with negative e-mails and phone calls.
In one of the film's scenes, a cardboard effigy of US President George W. Bush is placed on stage before an assembly, so attendees can pray he make America "one nation under God."
The film has no voice-overs or narrative. Heidi Ewing, who directed the film with Rachel Grady, said the aim was to show a slice of American culture unfamiliar to many in America and abroad.
When it was released in May, a Variety magazine reviewer said, "Liberals might also be alarmed by images of seven-year-olds in camouflage face-paint performing spiritual war dances."
The film also features scenes with disgraced evangelical leader the Reverend Ted Haggard, who resigned as pastor of the 14,000 member New Life Church in Colorado Springs last week after a gay sex and drug scandal.
An adult book by best-selling children's author Daniel Handler about love — gay and straight — will be turned into a film, his agent said on Tuesday.
Handler, who uses the pseudonym Lemony Snicket for his mock-gothic award-winning children's books A Series of Unfortunate Events, will write the screenplay to Adverbs, a collection of 17 interrelated stories on the complexities of love.
The film rights to Adverbs have been sold to New York-based independent film company GreeneStreet Films, his agent Charlotte Sheedy said.
Sheedy would not say how much the deal was worth.
Borat star and creator Sacha Baron Cohen is being lined up to star in a remake of a French comedy, the movie industry trade press reported Tuesday.
Cohen, basking in the glow of a record box-office opening for Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan last weekend, has been penciled in for a part in a re-telling of Le Diner de Cons, to be titled Dinner with Schmucks.
The French film revolves around a Paris publisher who urges his friends to invite the most pathetic people possible to a weekly dinner party, Variety reported.
The adventures of politically incorrect Kazakh journalist Borat have scored a record-breaking hit at the US box-office, erasing doubts over whether America would "get" the satirical creation.
Borat raked in US$26.4 million in North America at the weekend, far exceeding industry expectations of around US$15 million.
The total is a US record for a film opening at under 1,000 locations, edging out Michael Moore's 2004 documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 which took US$23.9 million in its first three days.
Borat sees its sexist, anti-Semitic, mustachioed hero in a series of real-life situations alongside unwitting victims.
A Russian government agency said it would refuse to grant permission for Cohen's controversial comedy to be shown in the nation's theaters, its distributor said yesterday.
The Federal Agency for Culture and Cinematography said the film could offend some viewers and contained material that "might seem disparaging in relation to certain ethnic groups and religions," according to Vadim Ivanov, theatrical sales director at Twentieth Century Fox CIS.
The agency informed the company in a letter that it would not grant the permission required to show the film in theaters.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s